Thank you all for the information and taking the time to respond. I've managed to convince him not to be retarded and to just custom build the same system I have now, because I know it works incredibly well for our uses. He'd wind up having to do it over time anyway and that HP he has was atrocious and he's well aware of it.

I learned quite a few things from this thread, so once again thank you all and this was not all for naught.